Last month, at the Bay Area Lightroom User Group, I got to try something I'd always wanted to do. In front of over 100 people, I used Lightroom to develop 29 mystery photos submitted by members of the audience.

...Stu Maschwitz sits down to a blacked-out Lightroom catalog loaded with a couple dozen photos submitted by strangers, and one by one he unveils and processes them as the whim strikes him, providing a running commentary about his artistic reasons for doing things, or technical comments about how to achieve in Lightroom whatever look he's going for.

Last year, we received a nice email from a film student at NYU asking about an educational discount. Unfortunately, there’s no mechanism for this in the App Store (except the volume educational pricing, which we do participate in), so we hatched a plan to do a back to school sale that anyone could take advantage of.

Does the timing actually make any sense? Are you even a student? Who cares? Slugline is on sale for 40% off through Thursday. That’s $23.99 instead of the usual $39.99.

Take advantage of this sale whether your definition of “ramen” is microwaved packets or $18 bowls of stewed pork belly.

Adobe quietly updated its mobile version of Lightroom last month. The update includes a highly usable, and even slightly hackable, new feature, and a long-standing bug that can cause your photo adjustments to be lost.

Almost Presets

The headlining feature of Lightroom Mobile 1.3 is the ability to copy and paste settings from one photo to another. It’s handy to be able to make an adjustment to one photo and copy it to others, but the reason I like this feature is that it offers an end run around the image editing limitations imposed on the mobile app.

Lightroom Mobile renders and processes the entire Adobe Camera Raw processing engine, but only allows you to adjust the parameters from the Basic panel in Lightroom’s Develop module. Presets can modify the other parameters, but you are limited to the presets that ship with the mobile app. It’s no secret that I love presets, so what I’ve done in version 1.3 is populate my synced collections with sample photos that use some of my favorite develop presets (including several Prolost Vintage presets). I can now copy and paste the settings from these reference images to any new photo I add. In other words, you can copy and paste Develop settings (from photos edited in the desktop Lightroom) that you cannot otehrwise modify using Lightroom Mobile on its own. It’s not quite as good as presets, but it’s almost there. I have even created some plain grey images to better show off the settings that I’m copying and pasting.

I thought I was kinda crazy, hacking this new capability to be a poor cousin to my most-requested Lightroom Mobile feature—until I saw Adobe’s own Russell Brown do exactly the same thing in his Lightroom Mobile 1.3 tutorial.

Clearly I’m not the only one yearning for user presets in Lightroom Mobile.

Develop, Cross a Road, Develop Again

Unfortunately, neither version 1.3.0, nor yesterday's 1.3.1 update, fixes a nasty bug that has long plagued the Lightroom Mobile photo editing process. When you adjust a photo’s Develop settings, Lightroom Mobile does not sync those settings back to the cloud until you exit back to the grid view. Your develop settings can therefore be lost rather easily, through normal use of your iOS device.

Imagine this: You open a photo in Lightroom Mobile, make some adjustments, and then a phone call comes in, or an important challenge to beat a friend at Crossy Road. You switch apps to go deal with that, and then you get distracted, and maybe it’s a while before you come back to Lightroom. When you return to Lightroom Mobile, your Develop settings are gone—the photo is in its original, unedited state.

What’s happened is that Lightroom has quietly quit in the background—as every iOS app does, by requirement—but without having synced your settings. I have reported this bug to Adobe, and they tell me they are working on a fix. But for now, be careful to always exit back to grid view (or choose Forec Sync from the little Cloud menu) to force a sync of any Develop adjustments that you don’t want to lose.

Lightroom Mobile is free in the App Store, and requires a Creative Cloud subscription. For a complete list of the new features in version 1.3, see Lightroom Product Manager Sharad Mangalick’s blog post.

My first job in Visual Effects was at Industrial Light and Magic. I struggled to learn the technical aspects of the job, but my first success at the company was artistic—Dennis Muren liked my lighting.

The first shot I lit and composited at ILM, in 1995.

Dennis Muren was, of course, a hero to me, and so this meant a lot. Every morning, sitting in Casper dailies with him, was surreal to me. Here I was, having my work critiqued by someone I’d idolized since I was old enough to read about how my favorite movies were made.

In the years since, I’ve often accused some in the visual effects industry of resorting to a ton of science to avoid using a pinch of art.

But even I have been guilty of this. I went through a phase of being slavish to the process of HDR lighting. That’s the thing where you photograph multiple exposures of a chrome ball (there are other ways, but the chrome ball was the most common for a long time), combine them into an HDR image, and then unwrap it into a spherical texture map. The result is a record of the actual light intensities falling on the location of the ball, in 360 degrees. And you can use it to automatically light an object.

Click through for a complete tutorial on capturing, and lighting with, an HDR light map.

The problem with doing this on a movie set is that the lighting you are slavishly capturing isn’t worth anything. It’s an an invisible accident hovering in the air somewhere near (if you’re lucky) someone’s artistic lighting work. As I wrote in my foreword to Mark Christiansen’s After Effects compositing book:

“Make it look real.” That would seem to be the mandate of the visual effects artist. Spielberg called, and he wants the world to believe, if only for 90 minutes, that dinosaurs are alive and breathing on an island off the coast of South America. Your job: Make them look real. Right?

Wrong.

Remember how terrific the T-rex looked when she stepped out of the paddock? Man, she looked good.

She looked good.

[...]The realism of that moment certainly did come in part from the hard work of Industrial Light and Magic’s fledgling computer graphics department, which developed groundbreaking technologies to bring that T-rex to life. But mostly, that T-rex felt real because she looked good. She was wet. It was dark. She had a big old Dean Cundey blue rim light on her coming from nowhere. In truth, you could barely see her.

Our clients pigeonhole us into the role of the prop maker: Build me a T-rex, and it’d better look real. But when it comes time to put that T-rex on screen, we are also the cinematographer (with our CG lights), the makeup artist (with our “wet look” shader), and the practical effects crew (with our rain). And although he may forget to speak with us in the same flowery terms that he used with Dean on set, Steven wants us to make sure that T-rex looks like a T-rex should in a movie. Not just good—impossibly good. Unrealistically, blue-rim-light-outa-nowhere good. Sexy good.

I wrote that without knowing how Dennis Muren felt about the chrome ball. So imagine my delight when I discovered this video of the man himself (courtesy of fxphd):

Note that this clip is from an fxphd course, and came to my attention because it had been uploaded to YouTube without permission or attribution. Fxphd is a paid online training service (awesome, and worth every penny), and it's not cool to re-post their material without permission. My deep thanks to fxphd for supplying this legit version of this clip for this post. If you want to learn about any aspect of filmmaking, from directing to shooting to high-end VFX, they are simply the best resource available.